Tuesday, 30 June 2009

The Next a two weeks or so a warm wind of news will blow from Bali, Indonesia, where today the gavel banged and the UN and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change began seeking an agreeable compact to replace the Kyoto Protocol. Tomorrow, this site will rummage through first-day reports from Bali’s crowded meeting halls.

For now, and most fittingly, comes relevant news that the very tropics that include Bali are definitively expanding - by a few hundred miles of latitude. So if you’re a reporter who couldn’t get to Bali to cover the story, perhaps a whiff of its ambience is coming to you.

Media attention is on data in the new journal Nature Geoscience, gathered together by a meteorological scientist at the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A key aspect is that as the mostly-moist tropics expand, they push the drier subtropics poleward too. Could be a press release out there, but The Tracker couldn’t find it and has to move on (after spending a long time trying to figure out what should be simple - conversion of an image from a pdf into a file that my picture manager can manipulate for uploading here.)

Much of the story’s circulation, including use of the term Hadley circulation, comes off Seth Borenstein’s account in the AP. He provides a muscular, understated recitation of the report’s conclusions without much embroidery and with explanation that the trend has also been apparent in other recent studies. The extent of the expansion is somewhat of a surprise to researchers, he writes in the eighth graf — an aspect that would seem to belong in or near the lede (and which, in other accounts, is). While global warming is the presumed, prime suspect, he writes, oscillations in El Nino intensities and ozone layer depletion are on the list, too.